Spoof Detector

A modification for SMF 2.1 that detects and prevents the use of Unicode character spoofing to cause mischief.

There are two main features of Spoof Detector:

• It ensures character spoofing cannot be used to create visually confusable names. For example, if a member named "Bob" (Latin letter o) exists, this mod will prevent another member from using the name "Bοb" (Greek letter omicron).
• It detects and prevent attempts to bypass the word censor via character spoofing. For example, if "quack" (Latin letter a) is censored, also censor "quack" (Cyrillic letter a).

Spoof Detector uses the Unicode Consortium's official list of "confusable characters" to detect spoofing attempts.


Settings

Before the mod will take effect, the admin must go to Administration Center ► Modification Settings ► Spoof Detector and run the Build Spoof Detector Lists task. This will download the latest version of the "confusable characters" list and use it to build and store a list of visually unambigous versions of members' display names.

Once that step has been completed, the following settings can be used:

• Detect character spoofing in members' display names
• Detect character spoofing in the word censor

Notes

• Already existing member names are not affected by this mod. So if "Bob" and "Bοb" both already exist on your forum, they will both be able to continue using their current display names unchanged. The new rules will affect them only when one of them tries to change their display name.
• Detecting character spoofing in the word censor may sometimes cause words to be censored incorrectly. For example, if the word "bum" is censored, the word "burn" might also be caught by the word censor, because "m" and "rn" are considered to be confusable in the Unicode Consortium's official list. To prevent a word from being censored incorrectly, just add another entry in the word censor to replace the word with itself (e.g.: "burn" => "burn").

License

Spoof Detector is released under the MIT License. A full copy of this license is included in the package file.


Changelog

Version 1.0:

• Initial release

SpoofDetector.tar.gz 56.69 KB v1.0 2.1.2

Manual installation info 2.1.1 2.1.2 2.1.3